Kevin Maney – författare

The founders of a respected Silicon Valley advisory firm study legendary category-creating companies and reveal a groundbreaking discipline called category design.

Winning today isn’t about beating the competition at the old game. It’s about inventing a whole new game—defining a new market category, developing it, and dominating it over time. You can’t build a legendary company without building a legendary category. If you think that having the best product is all it takes to win, you’re going to lose.

In this farsighted, pioneering guide, the founders of Silicon Valley advisory firm Play Bigger rely on data analysis and interviews to understand the inner workings of “category kings”— companies such as Amazon, Salesforce, Uber, and IKEA—that give us new ways of living, thinking or doing business, often solving problems we didn’t know we had.

In Play Bigger, the authors assemble their findings to introduce the new discipline of category design. By applying category design, companies can create new demand where none existed, conditioning customers’ brains so they change their expectations and buying habits. While this discipline defines the tech industry, it applies to every kind of industry and even to personal careers.

Crossing the Chasm revolutionized how we think about new products in an existing market. The Innovator’s Dilemma taught us about disrupting an aging market. Now, Play Bigger is transforming business once again, showing us how to create the market itself.

In today''s world, it''s no longer enough to create great new products; rather companies now must create whole new categories that destroy old ones. Uber created a new personal transportation category and destroyed taxis and limos. Salesforce.com created a new category of cloud-base sales automation, dethroning the old CRM industry. Airbnb, Workday, Tesla and Netflix are all winning by creating entirely new business categories that destabilise old ones.The category is the new strategy.The conclusion: If you want to build a legendary company, you need to design and build a legendary category at the same time, and dominate it over time. Your company needs to be a Category King. And if you don''t design a Category King, you''re creating a failure. Drawing on examples from within and beyond our own practice, PLAY BIGGER shows both entrepreneurs and established enterprises how to define, develop and rule a category over time.

A pioneering venture capitalist provides an actionable framework for founders and executives to create innovative, enduring companies built for growth and for societal good.

The Milton Friedman philosophy that companies exist only to increase shareholder value is dead and buried. The old Silicon Valley tenets of “move fast and break things,” minimum viable products, and hyper engagement at any cost must be replaced with new principles for an era of responsible innovation. We can no longer manage businesses solely for growth. With innovation comes responsibility: to generate returns beyond profits and to recenter technology as a force for good in the world. This requires a shift in the way organizations approach and value work.

A company’s mindset—its intent to do good, avoid harmful consequences, and innovate responsibly—is not enough. That mindset must be supported by a business model, a mechanism that leaders must intentionally and proactively build along with the company from the ground up, one that incentivizes and rewards the organization for fulfilling its intentions. Companies need a new set of KCIs, or key consequence indicators, that measure factors such as its impact on customers’ energy consumption, whether its product is being used equally across socioeconomic groups, or if it is actually solving the social problem it is addressing. Not only is this the right thing to do—increasingly, it is what customers, employees, and shareholders demand of business.

In this inspiring, practical, and actionable guide, Hemant Taneja:

A pioneering venture capitalist provides an actionable framework for founders and executives to create innovative, enduring companies built for growth and for societal good.

The Milton Friedman philosophy that companies exist only to increase shareholder value is dead and buried. The old Silicon Valley tenets of “move fast and break things,” minimum viable products, and hyper engagement at any cost must be replaced with new principles for an era of responsible innovation. We can no longer manage businesses solely for growth. With innovation comes responsibility: to generate returns beyond profits and to recenter technology as a force for good in the world. This requires a shift in the way organizations approach and value work.

A company’s mindset—its intent to do good, avoid harmful consequences, and innovate responsibly—is not enough. That mindset must be supported by a business model, a mechanism that leaders must intentionally and proactively build along with the company from the ground up, one that incentivizes and rewards the organization for fulfilling its intentions. Companies need a new set of KCIs, or key consequence indicators, that measure factors such as its impact on customers’ energy consumption, whether its product is being used equally across socioeconomic groups, or if it is actually solving the social problem it is addressing. Not only is this the right thing to do—increasingly, it is what customers, employees, and shareholders demand of business.

In this inspiring, practical, and actionable guide, Hemant Taneja: